The app landscape is littered with broken dreams: most smartphone applications are rarely re-opened once downloaded from an app store. It’s a major hurdle for companies attempting to introduce novel apps, given the minuscule success rate compared to the vast number that falter. For each victory story like that of Uber or Instagram, there are hundreds of thousands of unsuccessful attempts.
To avoid consigning your app to the pile of flopped ones, what measures can you put in place? Begin with these 10 questions to guide you.
Does Your App Address a Specific Problem Faced by Users?
It’s vital to have a clear understanding of your app’s purpose. If you’re fortunate, the inspiration for your concept stems from recognizing a gap in the market. Highlighting how your solution resolves a common issue can undoubtedly boost sales. However, the challenge is that users face various obstacles in meeting other individuals in their area, which the app simplifies. Take dating apps, for instance, which aid users in identifying potential partners.
How Innovative is Your App?
Your app can solve a problem, but being unique is also important for its success. It must possess distinguishing features from competing applications. If your product’s attributes are the same as the competition, it’s challenging to understand why customers would prefer it.
Contemplate the competition and contemplate how your app can set itself apart. What crucial features does it offer that make it distinctive? What can you do to ensure that your app stands out among its peers?
Do You Have a Clear Understanding of Your Target Audience?
Since your app’s success hinges on user adoption and engagement, it’s crucial to recognize your target audience early on and understand their tastes, interests, and needs. By creating a product that caters to their preferences, you can make it distinctive and stand out from the competition.
Examining the market and crafting user personas to contemplate the various ways individuals might use your app and the functions they’d anticipate finding are critical steps in your app’s development process. You can learn more about creating user personas here.
Have You Assessed Your Finances?
Developing an app can be expensive, so ensure that you have a precise estimate of costs before starting. This will determine the extent to which your product can evolve. Even if you’re outsourcing the app’s development to a team, establishing a budget is critical to determining what’s feasible and what’s not.
This is a crucial step if you decide to hire a contractor. If you want them to consider your product, they’ll need to know your budget constraints.
Is Your App User-Friendly?
There’s a risk of making your product design too complex, lacking the “wow” factor that customers desire. Nevertheless, you should prioritize reducing the burden of using your product for your customers. If you prioritize flashy and intricate features over a simple user experience, you’ll end up with a product that won’t be downloaded or used.
Does Your App Have Good UX Design?
An intuitive interface is an essential component of effective design. User experience designers are responsible for ensuring that users have a positive experience when using the software, which includes both visual aesthetics and subtle details like button clicks and animations.
In addition to being user-friendly, the visual design of your app is crucial to its success. Customers value an app that not only offers ease of use but also provides an engaging, enjoyable, and interactive experience.
Have You Conducted App Testing?
Conducting comprehensive testing of your product before launching it to the public is crucial. Quality assurance specialists not only identify issues but also assess the product’s usability, performance, and other essential aspects. This procedure is vital for producing a high-quality, bug-free product.
Have You Differentiated Between Essential and Optional Components?
As a business, it’s essential to distinguish between the fundamental functionality of an app and the nice-to-have extras. This approach allows you to prevent depleting your resources and overwhelming your audience by trying to squeeze too much content into the app.
To avoid this pitfall, the first step is to determine which product features are essential and which ones can be left out. This process need not go on indefinitely but only until the feasibility of the first product is established. You can always expand the functionality in future updates.
Have You Tried Advertising Your App?
However, a great product is only half the battle. It doesn’t matter how good it is if no one knows about it. Marketing requires an investment, whether it’s handled in-house or outsourced.
If you wish to generate hype around your app prior to its launch, marketing investment is required. Professionals in this field will employ channels such as social media and online advertising to pique the interest and excitement of potential customers. Ensure that you factor in marketing expenses in your budget so that you can run promotional campaigns on platforms such as Google and Instagram.
Does Your Company Offer Support?
Despite having comprehensive quality assurance procedures, customers may still face problems. In such cases, it’s usually best to provide excellent support to customers.
To ensure customer satisfaction, it’s crucial to offer various customer service channels through the app, including a knowledge base, chatbot, and live chat feature. If customer service is hard to reach or non-existent, this may result in problems and disgruntled customers, which may, in turn, harm the reputation of the company’s product or brand.
Developing a mobile app can be a challenging and time-consuming procedure, which can sometimes be exasperating. Nevertheless, there are measures you can take to minimize the likelihood of failure and enhance your app’s prospects for success. Though there is no assurance of success even if you pose these questions, they may aid you in devising a more solid strategy and avoiding common stumbling blocks.
